Pros:

Cons:

Half a decade after the release of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, the ultra-violent military first-person shooter franchise is back. Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the first game in the series to be developed by the Slovak Republic's Cauldron. Hopefully it's also the last, because Payback is a mess. The only thing it has in common with the first two SoF games is its name and the trademark gore. In every other aspect, from plot to gameplay to level design, Payback shoots itself in the foot repeatedly.

Payback puts you in the role of a mercenary who you don't care about who's double-crossed by an organization that you don't care about during a mission that you don't care about. The plot is so generic that it could have been bought off of the shelf at Wal-Mart, and the voice actors deliver their lines with all the urgency of the guy at a drive-thru reading back your order to you.

Each mission is hopelessly linear, and most suffer from weak level design to boot. There's usually only one path to go down, and it's lined with enemies that spawn at pre-determined locations to set up gunfights that can only be won in a small handful of ways. There are almost no opportunities for coming up with alternative strategies in battle, other than which of your three weapons to use. And even then, you're practically forced to "go native" and use the firearms dropped by your enemies, since finding ammunition for the guns you choose at the beginning of the mission is next to impossible.

Playing through a mission boils down to moving through the level in the only way that you can until some enemies appear. If you win the fight, you continue down the path to the next encounter, as if you're running a gauntlet instead of fighting in the street. If you die in battle, you have the option of continuing from one of the very few and far between checkpoints. This actually works out pretty well, since most of your in-game deaths come at the hands of enemies who spontaneously pop in behind you and fill your back with lead immediately after you trigger a checkpoint. Another nice feature is the way that the game defaults to "no" when it asks you if you want to restart from the last checkpoint. It's as if it's trying to save you from itself.

As bad as the level design is, the enemy AI is even worse. Your ethnically ambiguous insurgent terrorist enemies fight like British Redcoats in the Revolutionary War. They either stand in the exact same location and shoot at you until you kill them, or they run directly toward you in a straight line until you kill them. They hardly use cover, they don't readjust their tactics when the battle's not going their way, and they think that a flanking maneuver is something you do with a nice piece of beef.

The one thing that Payback does have going for it is its look. It's no Gears of War (which it desperately wants to be), but the graphics are crisp and clean and aren't oversaturated with the muddy brown and grey tones that dominate so many other military shooters. The high-contrast lighting is consistently bright enough that you'll never miss a splash of crimson on a wall as you paint the town red with indeterminately foreign blood.

And speaking of the gore, the damage modeling isn't any more outrageous than in previous SoF titles, regardless of what the back cover tries to tell you. But those games were developed by Raven Software, which delivered a sharp and enjoyable gameplay experience to go along with the buckets of gore. Payback, on the other hand, is just gore for gore's sake. It's unrealistically excessive without being cleverly over-the-top, a campaigning politician's cliche of what videogame violence looks like.

The game does offer a "low-violence" setting that scales back the decapitations and dismemberments dramatically, but it's not enabled by default. Of course, without all of the ultra-violence to distract attention from the game design, it's even more glaringly obvious that Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a thoroughly uninspired piece of hack work that gives you plenty of reasons not to buy it. Pick any one you like and save yourself the sixty bucks.